


Excavations

by luninosity



Category: Actor RPF, British Actor RPF, X-Men RPF, X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Professors, Anal Sex, Archaeology, Cave-In, Emotions, Falling In Love, Happy Ending, Holding Hands, Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Oral Sex, Rescue, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-13 12:03:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3380816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James was dressed like an adventure hero, like an H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne explorer: ginger beard and scuffed boots and shortness and dirt-smudges under his nails. He looked nothing at all like a proper professor of archaeology in this still-new twentieth century, no tidy waistcoat or respectable tweed.</p><p>Michael’s treacherous heart—and other body parts—noticed every single flex and curve of compact powerful muscle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a horse is a horse, of course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kernezelda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kernezelda/gifts).



> For a lovely friend. (Not your birthday-present! That's still coming. I just felt like you deserved a fic-gift.)
> 
> Imagine this all unfolding in some sort of nebulous late 1920s/early 1930s archaeologist/professor AU; picture, perhaps, Indiana Jones as university professor in _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ or _The Last Crusade._ Also Michael works on music history because of, well, his excitement about musicals and music and accordion-playing skills and so on.
> 
> The rating will go up once we get to certain chapters. Oh yes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are artifacts and office hours, and bandages and smiles.

A travel-weary dark-haired Scottish pixie, grinning and wind-blown, appeared in Michael’s tranquil university office halfway through a sunny summer afternoon; appeared, in fact, while Michael was marking first-day diagnostic quizzes and swearing under his breath at the misuse of Latin quotes. He set down the pen. “Where’ve you been?”  
  
“Hadrian’s Wall.” James McAvoy, fellow faculty member and most likely not actual supernatural creature, flashed him a smile. James was dressed like an adventure hero, like an H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne explorer: ginger beard and scuffed boots and shortness and dirt-smudges under his nails. He looked nothing at all like a proper professor of archaeology in this still-new twentieth century, no tidy waistcoat or respectable tweed. Michael’s treacherous heart—and other body parts—noticed every single flex and curve of compact powerful muscle.  
  
Secure behind his desk and typewriter, he cleared his throat. “You’re late.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“We had a faculty meeting yesterday. Classes start today. Dean Vaughn said that you—”  
  
“—that I’m adorable and have excellent teaching evaluations and bring us lots of publicity and shiny artifacts to peruse at everyone’s leisure. Symposium on post-Roman Britain next month? I’ll talk about bath-house traditions. I brought you a present.”  
  
“I work on musical history and historiography,” Michael said, resolutely ignoring thoughts about his fellow professor in the bath, resolutely telling his brain and other areas that James flirted with everyone like breathing and the line meant nothing at all, “not personal hygiene. And you’re lucky you _are_ adorable, because you’re in trouble.”  
  
“I’m not. I saw him in the hallway. Begged for forgiveness. Here.” The present was a small slim bronze statuette, a horse in motion, one ear slightly squashed by time: eighth century AD, Michael thought, probably that surviving Iron Age La Tène influence combined with distant memories of Rome; and the scholar in him wanted to scribble observations about animal symbology and equine worship cults and metalworking techniques, but mostly he was captivated by the graceful lines and the flow of mane and tail and outflung legs, wild and free.  
  
He put the sculpture on his desk. Beside the typewriter. Next to the stack of antique coins, and the shard of pottery, and the single terminal-end from a broken gold torc. That’d been last time. He sometimes suspected that James was trying to court him through artifacts; he sometimes suspected that James, for all the gregarious kindness toward others, knew too much about loneliness. He didn’t know why he thought so. Some emotion, maybe, behind blue eyes.  
  
“It looks good there,” James said. The afternoon sunlight fell into his hair, and stayed put in a tangle of gold and dark waves. “You didn’t say no, y’know, about the symposium. You’ve been working on that paper about bardic instruments and training, I know you have, we can make some sort of connection about moments of intimacy and metaphorical nakedness in the Celtic tradition.”  
  
“How do you know what I’ve—would you want something about intimate spaces and the importance of physical sensation? Instruments and kingship rituals. You have class in twenty minutes.”  
  
“And I came to see you first.”  
  
“Twenty minutes, James!”  
  
That smile flickered like a candle on a windy day. “S’pose you're right,” James said, and Michael's heart hurt quite suddenly, quite dreadfully, for no readily identifiable reason. “I'll go.”  
  
“Wait.” Please. Make the hurt go away. By being here. By smiling again. At me. “Thank you for—” He waved at the tiny horse, posed mid-flight. “This.”  
  
“Not a problem.”  
  
“You—are you _hurt?_ ”  
  
“It's a scrape!”  
  
“You're bleeding!”  
  
“Ah…well, all right, that might be true.” Wasn't a scrape. More of a gash, long and half-healed, visible below a rolled-up shirt-sleeve. James looked as if he were debating whether to hide it, in the honeyed spill of oak and sunlight and academic dust.  
  
“Sit down.” Michael fished the first-aid kit out of his top desk-drawer. “Five minutes. You daft Scottish dime-novel superman. What was it this time?”  
  
“All burly-thewed and mighty-muscled, am I? A rock.”  
  
“ _Just_ a rock.”  
  
“A terribly malevolent and pointy rock…engraved with a very unpoetic Latin death curse…”  
  
“With a _what?_ —did you check for poison? How's this?”  
  
“Of course I did, don't fuss.” James flexed his hand, swung his arm: testing the stretch of bandages across sun-pinkened freckled skin. “Perfect. Thanks. Will you be here when I'm done with class?”  
  
“My office hours will be over by then.”  
  
“Will you be here when I'm done with class?”  
  
“Are you planning to bleed on my floor again?”  
  
“Ah,” James said, and hopped off the desk, which got instantly more lonely. “Right, then. Going.”  
  
Michael relented. “I'll be here when you're done with class.”  
  
James's smile came back. Full force. Illuminated the world.  
  
“Ten minutes,” Michael pointed out, not as forcefully as he could’ve because of that smile and the answering lift in his own chest.  
  
James ran out the door, but paused to stick his head back in and yell, “Drinks on me, and let’s argue about Professor Jones’s latest Grail-quest theory!”  
  
“Go!”  
  
Alone in his office, Michael tucked the first-aid kit away and looked at his hands, briefly—they’d just been pressing snowy bandages over James’s blood—and then sat down hard in his chair. It held him up. Professorial comfort.  
  
He glanced at his new acquisition. James never brought him anything that’d be worth too much or rare enough to require a place in a museum; not that this tiny sculpture with one bent ear wouldn’t belong there, but James knew as well as he did the value of making artifacts available for others to study.   
  
James had been a prestigious hire for them, for this relatively new university in London; James had made a remarkable reputation for himself back home in Glasgow, young and exuberant and impressively right about the locations of several Iron Age burial mounds, passionate about teaching and archaeology and stories out of the past. He’d been installed in the office beside Michael’s for a year now. Michael could not remember ever smiling, wanting to smile, wanting to stay up late and debate the proper categorization of Anglo-Saxon leechbooks with someone over multiple pints at the university pub, more than he had these past months.  
  
James taught class the same way: open-hearted, exuberant and encouraging, full of physical gestures and demonstrations and leaps of insight. Michael knew himself to be good at their joint profession; he was an engaging lecturer, he loved his work, he could be convinced to demonstrate adaptations of contemporary radio hits on replicated classical instruments, accordions and lutes and pipes. James left him breathless.  
  
He did not know what James wanted, if James wanted anything, from him. Bandages and smiles. Someone to startle with gifts. The tiny bronze horse raced forever in place atop his solid desk, shimmering as it captured a sunbeam.  
  
He had another half hour to go in his listed office hours, and then ninety more minutes before James would be done. Dusk would be inching on, by then: sidling velvet intimations of night. James would buy him a drink; Michael would get the next round and would try to ensure that James ate something along the way, because despite vast willingness to consume good whiskey James was kind of a tiny person and consequently a surprising lightweight. James was good at self-monitoring, mostly, but nevertheless: Michael wanted to take care of him.  
  
Michael quite often wanted to take care of him, in fact. Bandages and smiles, he thought again. He knew that James didn’t need taking care of. Of course he knew.  
  
Two hours, then. He eyed the ominous ink-dark sea of student quizzes. Squared his shoulders. He could probably be done just before James came to find him.


	2. landslide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a cave-in, hurt James, terrified Michael, and hand-holding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course Michael would come. :-)
> 
> Also, James and his team are excavating a site [sort of like Newgrange](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange) but smaller, less famous, and less inclined to hold up against inclement weather.

Michael ran through the mud and whipping wind and falling dark. Tripped. Mud clung to his trousers, his shoes. He shoved himself up and sprinted on.  
  
The dig site, or what had been the dig site, wasn’t easy to get to. Off-road. Hilly ground. Right now it was a mound of collapsed rocks and rubble and that evil omnipresent sticky mud. Several people, and rescue equipment, milled around the heap in anxious eddies; earth-movers groaned.  
  
Michael tripped again—the gathering evening was doing no favors for the uneven terrain—but caught himself. Skidded to a halt as the closest bodies turned his way. Panted, “James—”  
  
“He’s alive.” Young Nicholas ran a hand through his hair, leaving dirt. Tall and gawky and endearingly puppy-eyed, he was one of James’s favorite graduate students; he’d been among the four invited out to the excavations, of which James had said, laughing, _it’s a long weekend, it’s an uncomplicated site, it’ll be good for them, hands-on practical knowledge of technique…_  
  
“Alive,” Michael echoed, a whisper. James wasn’t there. Wasn’t popping out of the ruins of the burial-mound to grin and toss him a timeworn glittering brooch. The air tasted like departing rain and soggy ground and loss: like the shocked emptiness of the space where short sturdy Scottish exuberance ought to be.  
  
The storm had come up fast and brutal, the night before. Unpredictable. Drowning James’s playful field trip, wrecking careful preparations, burying everyone who’d been inside that ancient hill.  
  
Burying James. Michael tried to remember how to breathe. He wasn’t sure he had been, not since he’d heard the news. It’d made the radio and the morning papers and a wireless message sent back to Dean Vaughn: prominent archaeologist missing after cave-in…  
  
Michael had run out of his office and flung himself onto a train without changing clothes or thinking first. No room for thoughts. No room to wonder what James would say to this precipitous arrival, as if they meant something to each other, as if Michael had any sort of right to throw himself down at James’s hospital bedside and cling to one freckled hand.  
  
He couldn’t not come. He just—couldn’t. There was no conscious decision. Only truth.  
  
He’d wanted to take his motorbike, fast and sleek and modern; but the storm’d caught up to London by then and he knew he’d lose control. He’d taken the train as far as he could and begged a ride from a local with a motorcar after that, and he’d prayed to a God he barely recalled from an altar-boy background: please let him be safe. Please let him laugh at me for coming, if that means he’s alive.  
  
“He’s alive,” Nick said again, and took his arm and led him around to a heap of debris that looked like a giant’d dropped stones on a child’s playhouse: splinters of wood, of equipment, whatever James had been using to shore up the entrance. “He’s talking to us. Morse code. With a rock-hammer. They’re digging out a new tunnel round back, they’ve been working since this morning, as soon as we could get near—” Michael could see it. Progress was being made. “—and it shouldn’t be too long. They have water and some food—James saved his own pack, at least—but the torch went out. And…”  
  
“And.” The storm was over, here and now: tattered wisps of clouds streamed guiltily away, having done their damage. The sky remained grey and sharp as old icicles.  
  
“Here, sit down, Professor.” Michael did, gingerly, on a rock. The blonde girl who’d been tapping purposefully at a boulder looked up at Nick and said, “He says a bottle of scotch would be nice.”  
  
“Tell him people with head injuries don’t get scotch,” Nick said, and Michael said, _“What?”_  
  
“You didn’t tell him?” She paused in the message to add, “Hello, Professor Fassbender,” with a complete lack of surprise at Michael’s presence. Anne-Marie was, Michael knew, another of James’s pet graduate students, and a brilliant testimony to James’s fervent belief that everyone including women could be genius professors and doctors and university scholars. This was a conviction that’d caused some uproar among more traditional faculty and administrators. Dean Vaughn had steadfastly taken James’s side.  
  
Michael, in the present, would’ve wondered what James had said about _him,_ such that none of the graduate students seemed disconcerted by his arrival. But he couldn’t, because Nicholas had mentioned _head injury_ and those words hung over the world like a lifted sword.  
  
“About that,” Nick said. “So…James and Benedict—you know Ben, he was in your seminar on medieval musical inheritances from the classical world, right, stop glaring at me, sorry, anyway—so they were inside when it all came down, James told us to get out when we heard the weather reports, but they were the furthest in…James says Ben’s got a broken arm and a tendency to panic in the dark…”  
  
Michael did not care, at this moment, about Ben’s broken arm. Nicholas, reading this in his expression, gulped and went on. “…so once we figured out that James was actually tapping Morse at us, we asked how he was…he said, um, he was bleeding…he couldn’t tell how bad in the dark…we told him to sit down and not move too much, but he’s been getting slower about answering…he is still answering! I swear. He’s with us. We’ll be in there in—”  
  
“Ten minutes!” supplied a man’s voice from the other side.  
  
“Ten minutes.” Nicholas looked at Michael’s face, and asked, “Do you need some water?”  
  
“Can I talk to him?” He put a hand on the rock, the enormous one they’d been messaging through. “Please.”  
  
“Um…do you know Morse code?”  
  
Michael swore to himself that he would, after this. Or in the next five minutes, if someone had a handy book. Why didn’t he know Morse code? Why hadn’t he come up earlier, or, hell, come _with_ James, or asked James not to go, or kissed James, just once, just one time because then they would’ve had that once, why hadn’t he— “…no.”  
  
“I told him you were here,” Anne-Marie said, pen scribbling across her notebook. “He says…hi, Michael…and, um…sorry you had to come get this present in person….”  
  
“Oh God,” Michael said, hand across his mouth, holding in tears.  
  
“…and if you got on the…motorbike?…in this weather he’s going to kick—I can’t say that to a professor!”  
  
“Tell him he can try,” Michael said, crying, “tell him to come out here and say so in person, maybe I’ll even let him win, and no I didn’t get on the damn motorbike, I took a train, oh Christ, James.”  
  
She finished—he had no idea how she might’ve edited that last sentence—and then hesitated. “He’s being quiet…”  
  
No, Michael thought. No. Not quiet. Not—no. Please, James. No.  
  
Shouts erupted from the other side. Breakthrough. A tunnel. Medics disappearing down it. Michael’s heart pulled his body up from his seat, and he ran.  
  
Benedict came out first, supported by a medic, cradling his arm in a makeshift sling; the tunnel wasn’t big enough for more than one at a time. Of course James would send his graduate student out ahead of himself; of course, because James was a truly generous heroic person and also a thoroughgoing idiot who didn’t realize that his head injury had to be more important than Ben’s clumsy limbs. Michael swiped a hand across his face to dash away falling tears.  
  
When he opened his eyes, James was there.  
  
James was supported by reaching hands, and they put him on a stretcher immediately; half of his face was covered in blood and the rest looked far too white, but he was saying, “I’m all right, I’m fine, look after Ben, he hates small dark spaces, where’s—” and jewel-blue eyes found Michael through a gap in the crowd.  
  
Michael stumbled to his side, slid to the ground, gathered up one weak hand. Tried to speak; couldn’t.  
  
“Hey,” James greeted, softly. Up on an elbow, and alert, if pale and not entirely vertical. “I’m fine. Just a scrape.” The medical consensus seemed to be that this was untrue, though they also seemed pretty certain James wasn’t going to die; the closest medic hovered, checking pupil size and vital signs and responses about name and date and recent events.  
  
Michael, holding on, managed, “Think you’re needing more than my first-aid kit, this time…”  
  
“No death curses, though.”  
  
“Don’t,” Michael said, “don’t even—you can’t joke about—James, you aren’t actually a pulp-fiction hero, please don’t be, please stay—”  
  
James squeezed his hand. Weakly, but with reassuring deliberate force. “Not going anywhere. Not finished reading your article…you know, from last week…just got my copy of that journal…”  
  
“I can read it _to_ you. In hospital.”  
  
“That means you’ll be there.” James’s eyes closed momentarily. Blood was drying across his left eyebrow. “Could live with that.”  
  
“You’d damn well better,” Michael said, and James laughed, opening those beautiful blue eyes again, holding Michael’s hand.


	3. in California, with my toes in the sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Hollywood invitation, the ocean in moonlight, and a bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains a not-terribly-explicit sex scene. Note the rating change!
> 
> Also, James's academic incident is very loosely based on something that happened to a Very Distinguished professor-friend of mine, who semi-facetiously suggested in an interview that a historical Robin Hood, if he existed, might've been gay or bisexual, and as a result received _actual death threats._

Los Angeles. Land of silver screens and palm trees. Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. The thunder and break of waves and pale golden beaches and starlets lounging in the sun. Michael, standing in the sand, watched James in the nightscape moonlight. Felt himself smiling: faint and wistful as the moonbeams.   
  
They’d been invited out to Hollywood, to this party, to this film, as historical consultants. Some sword-and-sandal epic, or in this case mock-medieval; someone’d gotten the idea that perhaps actual historians with actual specialty knowledge of post-Roman Britain should be involved. Michael and James had both gotten the summons, Michael for specific tidbits involving music history and prop instruments and the soundtrack and James because that most recent article on sexuality and King Arthur had garnered quite a lot of media attention. James had written the article more or less as an extended academic joke, assuming the premise of a historical Arthur and then frankly and seriously if facetiously discussing a king’s sexual options in and around the fifth century AD; he’d ended up giving several interviews to scandalized but fascinated reporters who couldn’t believe academics knew and would publicly employ the word “fuck”. Michael had laughed, in private, and had wondered whether James would ever use the word in any less academic context; had imagined that very sound, in fact, later on in his narrow white-sheeted bed, hand busy, pants shoved down.   
  
James had become even more of an academic celebrity in the wake of the vocabulary incident, insofar as the words _academic_ and _celebrity_ could be combined; this came with the accompanying good and bad forms of notoriety. Matthew Vaughn’d thrown up hands and essentially ordered James to get the hell out of his department and if possible any British-journalist-infested territories for a few weeks. James had gone. With Michael. Together, invitations already in hand.    
  
James had—with pure guileless sweetness in every pint-sized suit-and-tie wearing inch of him—leaned over as they’d boarded the ocean liner for the trip across the Atlantic. Had whispered innocently in Michael’s ear, “That’s a fuckin’ big boat.” Michael’d nearly slipped off the gangplank laughing.   
  
They’d spent the past few days mainly talking to people. Meeting with directors and producers. Wandering around film sets and backlots, saucer-eyed. James had fallen in love with the sheer scale of imagination. Michael had found himself wanting to grab a prop sword and jump right in, as if he were a boy again. Wondrous tales, brought to life by wooden tower-façades and the delight of pretending.   
  
This night’s party was a lavish one, filling up the boutique seafront hotel where they’d been given rooms. Hollywood had money, and did not mind spending it on two visiting British historians. James had pounced on the cocktails—including something brand-new called a Zombie, which Michael’s bartending background had taken one sip of and then taken away from James, who’d promptly found a second one; Michael’d sighed—and canapés, smoked salmon bites and chicken paté on toast and cranberry jelly. They’d nibbled and imbibed and shaken hands and listened to lazy jazz music and industry gossip, and somehow wandered out of wide double doors onto sand, in the depths of twinkling night.   
  
James was carrying his shoes and socks, and had begun rolling up his trousers, heedless of suit-lines and creases. “Come on.”   
  
“Where?” Michael said, watching well-muscled calves come into view. James had splendid calves, he decided: fair skin under a light dusting of hair, winking red-gold freckles, tempting strength. He was, perhaps, more drunk than he’d first thought.   
  
“The ocean,” James announced happily, and darted off that way. The moonbeams chased him, laughing; the waves crashed and roared and filled up the world.   
  
Michael shook his head, yanked off his own shoes, and bolted after. He was not about to leave James on his own. Not when there might be more deadly rocks lurking out of sight, and oh he still felt cold when thinking about James and cave-ins and rocks. More than that, though: James wasn’t hurt, was laughing and teasing him.    
  
And he wouldn’t let James go. Not here under the moonlight, on a fairytale evening in California, on the other side of the world.   
  
James didn’t dive into the ocean. Only waded out to knee-depth, surrounded by starlight and midnight waves. Only stood smiling while inky water lapped at bare skin.   
  
Michael said, standing at the line between shore and shimmer, “Crazy, James, completely crazy, you are,” and the seas billowed and sighed.   
  
James’s mouth quirked upward: a flicker of motion and emotion. “Don’t follow me, then.”   
  
Michael shook his head again, no words for the spill of hopeless painful marvelous yearning inside his chest. Nothing that could be said aloud, for all that it was true: I’ll always follow you, he promised mutely, under moonlight, witnessed by shivering silky waves.   
  
He splashed out into the water. It coiled and murmured around his legs, getting the bottom of his rolled-up trousers wet. It felt cold and buoyant, like floating silver, and he knew he’d remember every ripple and every breath of sea-scented air.   
  
James held out a hand to him, illuminated by stars. His eyes were full of stars too. “You always find me.”   
  
“In the ocean,” Michael said, “or after a cave-in, or when you find me in my office, every time you find me, I’ll always look for you.”   
  
James moved closer. The next wave soaked both their legs, suits clinging and damp.    
  
“James,” Michael said, and James kissed him.   
  
James tasted like rum and fruit punch and heat and salt. James kissed like kissing Michael was the only reason to be alive, the soul of the world.   
  
Michael put both arms around him in the moonlight. Kissed him back. Exploring, discovering, tracing the contours of lips and the curve of a smile and the catch of a breath.   
  
Ocean-drenched and tremulous, they ended up in James’s hotel room. Michael couldn’t recall the steps in between; like a dream, he thought, like an opium-tinted languorous swirl of heady want, measured not in hours or minutes but in the warmth of James’s skin when Michael’s hands found his waist, in the rasp of beard against his face. He leaned back against the door, head falling into wood with a thunk as James undid him: waistcoat and shirt and heart and soul.   
  
James tugged at Michael’s trousers; Michael reciprocated, but then had a magnificent fantastic glorious idea, and got on his knees and pulled James’s clothing off. James gasped; Michael kissed his hip, and gazed at the sight before him, and then leaned forward and took James into his mouth.   
  
James swore out loud, a broken bitten-off desperate curse, and then, “Michael—” Michael pulled back long enough to look up, James’s cock resting thick and sticky over his lips. Their eyes met.    
  
James swallowed, lifted a hand, hesitated. Michael kissed the tip of him, devout and lingering. James put the hand on his head. Michael shut his eyes and let James fill up his mouth. He was precisely where he wanted to be, where he’d always wanted to be; he could taste James everywhere, could feel the moment that hand tightened in his hair, and the world sang with radiance.   
  
James touched his face after, stroked his cheek, coaxed him up onto his feet; James had slumped back against the wall, panting, eyes soft and wide and wondering, and Michael put arms around him and James leaned into him, and they held each other.   
  
James took his hand and led him to the bed. Michael went willingly. He would go anywhere with James.   
  
James bit his lip, then smiled again, and stroked a hand along Michael’s cock. Michael’s cock, standing upright and eager, twitched, leaking clear excitement. James hadn’t managed to remove his own unbuttoned shirt, earlier; he shrugged it off now, letting rumpled fabric fall into a heap on the floor. Michael leaned in to kiss him. James said into the kiss, “Would you—I mean, can you—would you want to—ah, Vaseline—”   
  
Michael stopped to stare at him. James blushed intensely, vivid enough to smother all the freckles. “I don’t mean I was expecting—I wasn’t—never mind!”   
  
“What do you mean never mind,” Michael said, “yes, oh God yes, please.”   
  
“I use it on cracked skin,” James said, looking everywhere but at him, “after expeditions, I sort of always have some, I hate my skin, I’m so sorry.”   
  
“James.” Michael touched his face, lifted his chin with a forefinger. “Really yes. I want to.” In the pause the waves thundered and rolled across sand, echoing beyond the open window, white curtains fluttering in the breeze.   
  
James shut his eyes. They were sitting very close together, hips and shoulders meeting, Michael’s hand somehow not having stopped caressing James’s face, cupping his cheek, learning the shape of a cheekbone. James whispered, “I mean I want you to—inside me,” and Michael’s brain took those words and tried to process them and make them fit for a while, and finally just wrote them in sky-high letters of glowing _yes!!!_ and gave up.   
  
He got out, “You…you want…” That hadn’t even been on his mind. He still didn’t know about James, not really; he knew about himself and his own desires, but those weren’t desires men admitted to aloud, and even then there was an enormous gap between what he’d just done and what James was asking for; there was a world of divide, in social conception, between giving and accepting, and if he’d thought that idea was even an option he’d’ve offered himself before assuming that of James.   
  
“I don’t do this a lot,” James said. “Any of it.”   
  
“We don’t have to—”   
  
“I want to.” James looked up at him, eyes luminous blue in the night. They’d not bothered to light any lamps; the hotel room cradled them in muted shades of indigo and opal and grey. Whiteness in the crisp lines of sheets. Sea-spray in the air, not cold in the slightest. Waistcoats and ties shed like lost inhibitions across the floor. California and moving-picture invention and palm-tree shapes like encouraging ghosts, a far cry from London and university-hued propriety and neatly-bound books scattered across an office desk. Another world. A world where this could be real.   
  
James said, quiet as the moon, “I’ve only done this—what I’m asking for—one other time. It wasn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t hate it, at least, there’s that. But I want to, with you. That’s different. I want to give you this. Me.”   
  
“Oh,” Michael breathed, “James,” and put both hands on his face and kissed him, kissed him until every last drop of apprehension and heart-soreness and longing gave way to desire and knowledge of desire returned.   
  
He laid James down carefully across the cool starlit cotton sheets, and found the tiny pot of slickness in James’s bag, and lavished attention on sparkling freckles and intimate spaces; found the spot that made James cry out and arch up into his hand; spent time and more time easing James’s body open and pliant and ready around his fingers. No hurry. All the time in the world, tonight, this charmed night.   
  
James let out unrestrained moans and keens and cries, losing himself in the ecstasy, offering himself and his pleasure up to Michael, no hesitation. He’d decided, and he gave with nothing held back; Michael’s heart broke with brilliant clear-eyed love. When he moved and pushed inside and they fit together, James breathed his name: a single astonished gulp of sound, hands clutching Michael’s biceps, blue eyes gazing up at him with utter joy and trust. Michael moved again, found the right angle, thrust; James’s eyes fluttered shut, and then opened slowly, shining.   
  
After, he pulled James into his arms, both of them lying sated and heavy and safe in the center of the sprawling bed with the no-longer-crisp sheets. James put his head on Michael’s shoulder. Michael kissed the top of that head, tasting wavy dark hair, loving the gust of breath across his chest when James exhaled.    
  
They fell asleep entwined and naked, encircled by the steady pulse-beat of the waves.


	4. whistle for the choir

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Motorbikes, an afternoon with standing stones, and love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably my other favorite chapter, if I HAVE to choose.
> 
> Also classic motorcycle jackets [were in production as early as 1928](https://www.schottnyc.com/forum/posts/1928_model.htm). Picture James in one of those.

On a sun-dappled afternoon, interminable faculty tea-club social finally breaking up as everybody wandered home, with clouds playing tag with the light overhead, James said, “Go for a ride?” Michael said yes, because he’d always say yes to James; not blindly, but certainly without question on a day like today when they both had beckoning motorbikes and James had that smile on his face.  
  
Michael’s BMW import was newer, modern and fast; James admired it with boundless enthusiasm, while Michael couldn’t not be impressed, every time, at James’s painstakingly restored pre-war Triumph. It’d been his grandfather’s, he’d said once; James never mentioned a father, living or dead, and Michael had never asked. He took every small revelation he was offered—a teasing story about a sister and practical jokes, a grandmother who’d once thrown a shoe at a very young James for those practical jokes, an apprenticeship at a confectioner’s shop—and tucked each one away deep in his heart, wrapped in gold-paper and crystalline love.  
  
They roared away along country roads beneath racing clouds, in a world of blue and white and whipping wind.   
  
James wanted to go and find standing stones, and they did; not any of the major formations, not a Stonehenge or Avebury, but a simple half-broken windswept semi-circle on a fern-laden hill. Bluestone and granite. Sparrow-nests and fallen rock and history lying amid long grass. Their bikes perched beyond the outer ditch, watching indolently. James set a hand on the rough grey surface of the closest upright shape, making friends with long-dead builders, meeting ghosts for one tangible moment. He’d gone hatless, and the wind tugged his hair into fantastical shapes, and he touched fingers and thumb together, pensively, after.   
  
“Come look at this,” Michael said, not knowing what to say, how to shape the feelings that filled up his body behind his breastbone, “this smooth bit, axe-polishing, do you think?”  
  
“Probably,” James said, coming over, “they did it at Avebury…I’ve always liked this spot. Half overgrown, all wild, just waiting for people like they knew we’d come back eventually…”  
  
“They.”  
  
“Them.” James hooked a thumb at the three standing megaliths, at the drunken two tipped onto lazy sides beyond, at the broken one that nevertheless flirted with the sunlight in its cracks and edges.   
  
“You and rocks,” Michael sighed, and James laughed. The rocks picked up the merriment and bounced it back into the day.  
  
They explored for a while longer, chatting about solstices and proposed astrological uses. James petted the rocks absentmindedly while talking: a gesture mid-debate, an unthinking kindness to stoic stone in the midst of cheerful bickering over gender roles in Neolithic nature worship. Michael fought back the urge to set his hand atop James’s, to freeze animated freckles in place for a timeless instant between his palm and sunwarmed antiquity.  
  
James glanced up at him as if hearing that thought. Those eyes danced in gavottes of blue.  
  
James was, Michael thought, too elemental and fey to be a serious academic gentleman, with that wayward dark hair and those enormous sapphire eyes and the neat curve of that waist under a beaten-up motorcycle jacket and the breadth of strong shoulders. But James was too solid and compassionate to be anything other than human. Too—  
  
Well. Human.  
  
James smiled at him, fingertips skimming aged blue-veined rock. Michael's breath caught in his throat: tripped up on a broken artifact of love and need and desire.  
  
Because British weather had a determined disregard for human convenience, the clouds returned. Rain started falling. It was tender rain, like dandelion-fluff and daydreams. It glittered on James’s eyelashes and left tearlike spots on Michael's face.  
  
“Come on,” he said, and they got out of the wet.  
  
They ended up at a village pub about two miles down the road. It resembled most other village pubs in the heart of sleepy England: low-slung and shadowy and comfortable that way. The gnarled wood and knotholes might've been in place since before Cromwell, and the light glimmered dim and storm-cool and story-dense. One or two obvious locals looked up as James and Michael entered, but in true disinterested tradition returned to their own company.  
  
James ordered pints of something local and black and bitter, plus Guinness beef stew for Michael and distressingly yellow-colored curry for himself, and then got into a lively discussion with the bartender about the seasoning of papadums. Michael shook his head, bemused and fond, and found a table and sat down.  
  
James came over, having triumphantly negotiated the exchange of his own cream-cake recipe for six free chocolate biscuits, and sat down too. “Here, have one. Or three. Three’re for you anyway.”  
  
“Before lunch?”  
  
“It’s what pulp-fiction heroes would do.”  
  
“Living dangerously…all right, these’re delicious. Am I ever going to live that down?”  
  
“No, you made the comparison. Me and the adventure stories.” James finished off a second biscuit. “Hunting treasure, x marks the spot, thrilling tales of plunder, all that…I’m not really, you know.”  
  
“You’re not what? No, of course not, you’re not fictional. I think I’d sort of know.”  
  
“No,” James said, “I didn’t mean that,” and then drank a third of his beer without looking up.   
  
“You’re not what,” Michael said when he resurfaced.  
  
“Nothing. A hero. Never mind. I like being a hero for you. You think of me like Hollywood, sometimes.”  
  
“No,” Michael said. James’s eyes looked surprised.  
  
“You wouldn’t worry about it,” Michael told him, “if you weren’t real. I like that you’re real. Eat more, I’m not going to carry you home.”  
  
“It’s one fuckin’ pint,” James said, but his ears and cheeks were very slightly pink, and he was smiling behind the embarrassment. “I’ll be fine.”  
  
“I like hearing you say fuck.”  
  
“ ’S just a word.”  
  
“Not when you say it.”  
  
“Only for you.” James had left his hand resting on the table after setting down his beer. Michael put his beside it. Shared warmth on splintery ground, as the rain tattooed the dingy windowpane. James’s eyes turned the innuendo— _fuck? only for you_ —into a subtler moment: sweet and honest and true.  
  
“I love you,” Michael said. No one was looking or listening. His fingers skimmed shorter blunter freckled ones: so close, lying together on uneven ancient wood. “You don't have to say it back. _Don’t_ say it back if you—I just wanted to say it. Once.”  
  
James looked at their hands. Moved his even closer. Overlapping. “I'm not scared of much.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I only never thought—” James bit his lip. The scent of incipient curry suffused the air, rich and brightly spiced in the shadows. “I never thought you'd—no one ever stays. For me.”  
  
“Idiots,” Michael judged, with feeling, “the lot of them; have you _met_ you?”  
  
“I fuckin’ love you,” James said. “I always have. That first day, when you were on my hiring committee, and I walked in trying so hard not to be nervous and you smiled at me. That smile, that felt so real, and I—I knew I wanted to know you. Someone who could smile like that. I just kept trying to make you smile again. I love you.”  
  
“You never needed to try,” Michael informed him, “you make me want to smile, just you, I just need you,” and James's foot found his, nudging, asking and answering under the canopy of their table and the drumbeats of the falling rain.


	5. east of the sun, west of the moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in Michael's office, with sunshine, a question, and an answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Bonus points if you guessed all the songs in the chapter titles, by the way. :-)

Michael set down his pen, stretched arms over his head—his left shoulder popped; getting old, he thought—and got up, mostly to work the kinks out but in part out of triumph. He’d been grading term papers for three hours. The springtime sun sent sparkling rays through his window to play with dust motes, teasing. It knew he couldn’t come out to play, or at least he’d not been able to until now, upon finishing and achieving freedom.   
  
He contemplated his drinks cabinet, not-terrifically-cleverly disguised in a brown-and-gilt globe in the corner. Celebratory whiskey, perhaps. Celebratory whiskey with James, who had finished all his own grading the day before and shouldn’t be on campus today but would be, having offered to come meet him that afternoon. Having promised to come by on the motorbike, exuberant and reckless as one of his undergrads, except that that wasn’t true, because James was the sort of person who looked out for his students and agreed to be a new-admit mentor for the upcoming year, and Michael loved that dichotomy; Michael loved all the layers of him, buried stories cast in Highland bronze.   
  
He loved his students too, albeit not in the same way. He’d saved the best ten papers for last. There’d been a marvelously insightful one about the antecedents of the ballad tradition in folk culture. Michael was planning to inquire about that undergrad’s career plans and any interest in graduate study, possibly with a fellowship.   
  
Thinking about research and submitting grades and books he might actually have time to read for fun—some Lord Dunsany, maybe, James was a fairy-story fan and Michael was willing to be introduced—he ended up distracted. Walking into the corner of his desk. His hip objected; he swore at the desk and his own ineptitude, flailed a step, ran into his trash bin, wobbled and failed to regain balance.    
  
He and the trash bin both fell over. With a clatter and a headache.   
  
While he was lying on his floor staring at the ceiling, the clatter kept on. Didn’t seem right, but he wasn’t processing yet, sort of stunned—   
  
His window thumped. More accurately, someone came through the window with a thump and landed squarely at his side. “Michael!”   
  
“What,” Michael said, because apparently James had just launched himself through Michael’s window, which really shouldn’t be possible at that angle. “Those open outward.”   
  
“I’m an archaeologist. I’m very flexible. Where’re you hurt? How bad?” James’s hand on his face felt warm and worried and loving. “How many fingers’m I holding up?”   
  
“Christ. Three. I’m only clumsy. _How_ flexible, exactly?”   
  
“Nope,” James said, “not while you’re hurt,” but stopped checking for potential skull fractures and flopped right down on the floor on his stomach, sprawled out at the exact angle to look Michael in the eye. His hair stood up in anxious ruffles; he’d worn his leather jacket again, soft and time-battered, and he was keeping slightly more weight on his left side than his right, courtesy of an eventful encounter with a tomb’s trapdoor six weeks ago. Michael wanted to kiss him everyplace. “Want me to disembowel your trash bin, then? ’ve got half an Anglo-Saxon ceremonial spear back in my office.”   
  
“Tempting. Might have to decline. That trash bin’s protected by the forces of university budget restrictions.”   
  
“No replacements?”   
  
“Not if you kill it with a spear. That can’t be comfortable for you.”   
  
“You’re down here,” James retorted, as if this were a perfectly flawless argument. “I was coming to see you anyway. How’s the grading?”   
  
“Just finished. You were coming through the window?”   
  
“I would’ve walked around to the door, but then you lost a battle with your office furnishings. So I hurried.”   
  
“I love you,” Michael said, putting both arms around him for forceful cuddles, keeping James firmly in place atop his chest, motorcycle jacket and bruised ribs and all. The sunbeams glittered and swooped deliriously. “My office door’s locked.”   
  
“Ah,” James said, “congratulatory flexibility, in that case, for finished grading and your health,” and Michael started laughing, feeling the delight of James’s heartbeat in time with his own, and James said, “Marry me.”   
  
The world went iridescent and soundless. Astonished and poised: the lift of a wing before a downbeat, the hint of diamond not-quite-discovered under stone.   
  
“Oh God fuck yes,” Michael said, lying on the floor of his office with James in his arms.   
  
James opened his mouth, closed it, did it again. The wall of oaken desk towered benevolently over them. The trash bin rolled itself for no reason at all into Michael’s foot, spilling papers.   
  
“Don’t tell me you’re actually speechless,” Michael said. “I mean, you. You did ask me.”   
  
“You said yes,” James breathed. “You said fuck. You said fucking _yes._ To me.”   
  
“You dove through my window and offered to spear my trash bin. I love you. Yes.”   
  
“Yes…you know we can’t—I mean, in public—I mean we won’t be, you were even an altar boy, fuck, what did I just, I can’t ask you to do this—”   
  
“You want to marry me,” Michael said, and put a hand into James’s hair, slid it down to cup his cheek, rubbed a thumb slowly over distressed freckles. James stopped protesting, apprehensive and hopeful and amazed. “I know what you’re asking. What we can have. And can’t. I’ve thought about it—don’t tell me you thought you were the only one, of course I was thinking about it. I want you.”   
  
“You—”   
  
“So we’ll be confirmed bachelors.” He touched the corner of James’s lips, felt the hesitant quirk of half-smile. “So we’ll get a house and move in together, like Patrick and Ian—” James had met both emeritus professors at university functions, and Ian had always treated Michael like a sort of faculty protégé; everyone knew what the confirmed bachelor euphemism meant, and no one at this particular university, under Dean Vaughn’s emphatically tolerant administration, gave a damn. “—and, y’know, Ian’s even ordained, we’ll get to have a ceremony, maybe, you and me. In private. Maybe someday in public, if that reform law happens, I hope it does, I’d be proud to be there with you. But either way yes. I want to marry you. I want to be married to you. I know what I want. I love you.”   
  
James murmured, “You _were_ thinking, weren’t you, I love you,” and blinked rapidly: raindrops trembled in blue eyes, but did not fall. Michael wondered whether they were tears of relief or comprehension of the yes at last or simple happiness too pure to hold inside; he brushed a thumbtip along damp eyelashes, and James smiled more widely.   
  
“Besides,” he added, “someone needs to follow you around with a first-aid kit,” and this time James laughed, answering. “So I get to protect you from your office furniture. Only fair.”   
  
“My hero,” Michael said, to that laugh. James knew he was teasing, knew that the important parts weren’t mountain-climbing and treasure-hunting and thrilling tales of derring-do. He knew James knew, these days; and the joke stretched out, private and shared.   
  
“You make me real,” James whispered back. His eyes said: yours. Always, yours. “Should’ve bought you a ring. Should’ve gotten up off your floor. Down on one knee.”   
  
“Didn’t you bring me a Viking arm-ring one time? I don’t want you down on one knee. You have bruises. Besides, like this I can kiss you.”   
  
“Does that count? I’ll bring you a hundred more. So I’m staying right here, then, I like your methods of persuasion. How’s your headache?”   
  
“What headache,” Michael said, tugging him into another kiss right there on the floor under open-windowed paper-scented academic sunshine, “I’m getting married to you.”


End file.
